No: CSAM and murder are not genericizable equivalents in both directions across the chasm of contexts. An outcome for non-CSAM law is assumed applicable to CSAM law; an outcome for CSAM law is not assumed applicable to non-CSAM law. Yes, some decisions can cross from CSAM to non-CSAM, but the process is much more fraught, uncertain, and subjective: which is to say, ‘uncodable’ in engineering terms, rather than simply being a matter of having a footnote citation of existing ‘case law’ as it is when applying non-CSAM law to CSAM contexts. Generally modern societies consider this discontinuity to be ‘fair’ as they tend to view the population of children as deserving of unusual, context-specific protections — though co sidering how regressive the marriage and child labor laws of the southeastern United States are, I can certainly understand that this may come as a surprise to some! — and they tend to reach that judgment in this modern era regardless of well-constructed logical arguments claiming equivalence only once the social and cultural CSAM context is disregarded in their framing.

The argument that ‘the illegality of AI-generated CSAM would therefore apply to all AI-generated illegality and thus is undue harm upon non-CSAM contexts’ is constructed on the basis that ‘A therefore B’ implies ‘B therefore A’, which is untrue here as detailed above. If you have a better argument in defense of the right to generate CSAM, I recommend a refresher on obscenity laws, how they vary per country, and why they cannot be reduced so simply to ‘CSAM, therefore non-CSAM’ before presenting it; that’s not how it works, no matter how unpalatable or displeasing the one-way discontinuities of CSAM law may be. It’s also worth considering why Apple would both support individual freedoms and privacies while also refusing to deliver the overreach of privacy-destroying CSAM scanning that they at one point had announced last year; that is a very concrete example of undue harm to non-CSAM contexts, and the quality of this discussion would greatly benefit from familiarity in depth with the topic.

The consumption (possession) of CSAM is criminalized. Having a photo of you killing someone is not criminalized, but it will be used as evidence against you. These are not comparable